Psychophysical experiments were conducted in the UK, Taiwan, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, and Iran to assess colour emotion for two-colour combinations using semantic scales warm/cool, heavy/ light, active/passive, and like/dislike. A total of 223 observers participated, each presented with 190 colour pairs as the stimuli, shown individually on a cathode ray tube display. The results show consistent responses across cultures only for warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive. The like/dislike scale, however, showed some differences between the observer groups, in particular between the Argentinian responses and those obtained from the other observers. Factor analysis reveals that the Argentinian observers preferred passive colour pairs to active ones more than the other observers. In addition to the cultural difference in like/dislike, the experimental results show some effects of gender, professional background (design vs. nondesign), and age. Female observers were found to prefer colour pairs with high-lightness or lowchroma values more than their male counterparts. Observers with a design background liked low-chroma This article was published online on 12 November 2010. An error was subsequently identified in Table II. This notice is included in the online and print version to indicate that both have been corrected. *Correspondence to: Li-Chen Ou (e-mail: l.ou@leeds.ac.uk).Volume 37, Number 1, February 2012 23 colour pairs or those containing colours of similar hue more than nondesign observers. Older observers liked colour pairs with high-lightness or high-chroma values more than young observers did. Based on the findings, a two-level theory of colour emotion is proposed, in which warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive are identified as the reactive-level responses and like/dislike the reflective-level response.

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Two azo dyes, acid red 1 (AR1) and acid red 18 (AR18), were used alone or in combination with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) for the electropolymerization of a pyrrole monomer. Polypyrrole (PPy) showed higher redox capacity when SDS and AR18 were used simultaneously as dopant agents (PPy/AR18-SDS) than when the conducting polymer was produced in the presence of SDS, AR18, AR1, or an AR1/SDS mixture. Moreover, PPy/AR18-SDS is a self-stabilizing material that exhibits increasing electrochemical activity with the number of oxidation–reduction cycles. A mechanism supported by scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction structural observations was proposed to explain the synergy between the SDS surfactant and the AR18 dye. On the other hand, the Bordeaux red color of PPy/AR18-SDS, which exhibits an optical band gap of 1.9 eV, rapidly changed to orange-yellow and blue colors when films were reduced and oxidized, respectively, by applying linear or step potential ramps. Overall, the results indicate that the synergistic utilization of AR18 and SDS as dopant agents in the same polymerization reaction is a very successful and advantageous strategy for the preparation of PPy films with cutting-edge electrochemical and electrochromic properties.

In the present study, the CCC shade sorting method was employed with CMC(2:1) color difference formula on the colorimetric data (CIEL*a* b*) of 37 fabric color sets. The k‐means non‐hierarchical clustering technique was also combined with the CCC shade sorting method to increase its efficiency. The results of this combined method showed a slightly better performance, as compared with the CCC method. Also, a new proposed shade sorting method by the application of principal components analysis (PCA) technique was used to identify and remove the outliers in each of the color sets. The results of separating the outliers showed that although the diameter of group criterion was improved significantly, the number of groups, the number of singleton groups, and the number of groups with low samples were increased considerably. Finally, in a second new proposed shade sorting method, PCA was used as a data reduction tool on the colorimetric data of the 37 color sets. Then, the two first principal components in combination with a k‐means clustering technique were used for the clustering of the samples in each color set. The results of this second new proposed method were found to be similar to the CCC method considering number of group and fabric consumption criteria. The second new proposed method revealed a moderately worse result, with regard to the diameter of group criterion, than the CCC method.

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